Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Seeing the World as an Image of Paradise An artist sees the world and that is all. And life’s worries are dissolved in this encounter. An artist has no self as a great poet has said. He is only seeing. And that seeing is its own reward. An artist knows the secret that there is no secret or special knowledge vouchsafed to him but life itself has opened up to make prying into special or secret corridors uninteresting. Life is ever too interesting an affair to warrant slip into any distraction. Defamiliarizing the world the artist enchants it. Since the privileging of rational or scientific modes of encountering the world artists had to explain their position and in fact to protest against enormous impoverishment of the world. A world without mystery is a dead world or inhuman mechanical world. It is a world where magic, myth, mystery, miracles, grace, freedom and superabundant joy of creativity are banned or suspect. And man doesn’t live by bread alone. An artist lives in a different

He disarms popular critiques of religion from all kinds of modern Western critics. Chesterton is arguably amongst the most brilliant spokespersons and stylists of Tradition-centric worldview. If we want to see how every view that scoffs at God and religion is an abuse of intelligence, or misreading of their object, or failure hardly worth our consideration, read G.K Chesterton. Chesterton (along with C.S Lewis and Peter Kreeft whom he influenced) disarms popular critiques of  religion from all kinds of modern Western critics. While recognizing the antidolatrous function of certain insightful critiques in modern readings of religion, one may also read Shaykh Abdul Wahid Yahya, Shaykh Isa and Huston Smith to puncture the balloon of secularist critique and dismissal of world religions on scientific or philosophical grounds.       Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is arguably the most forceful, lucid and articulate expression of a host of beliefs mostly shared by major world religions and disputed

Iqbal thought that the West is a development of Islam. Willy nilly, we live in the Eupropeanized world – our political institutions, our education, our economy, our sciences, our technology and our largely secularized post-theological world in which metaphysics as traditionally understood has been displaced from the centre stage – all testify to it. In Heideggerian terms one could say that modern man’s relation to Being is marked by encounter with Europe, its science and technology. In this technologized world, the world seen as a resource, God withdraws. Man is forced to live in a world where faith as it traditionally used to be is not available. In Iqbalian terms it might be rendered as a long night of waiting for God since the world has its own uses for destinies to be shaped( “Kare jehan daraz hae ab mera intizar ker” ).       We are in the world indelibly marked by colonial legacy and are paying for the choices we have made. We have adopted colonizer’s designed development proj

Our religious scholars generally choose not to be well informed on the troubling questions that modernity has raised. How do we engage with “Neo-Salafi”/“Wahabi” Islam, “Sufi” Islam, Revivalist/“Political” Islam and in fact endless debates amongst various juristic and theological schools; and also consequent divisive interpretations of such important issues as Caliphate/State, women’s/minority’ rights, interfaith dialogue? We find fundamentalists on the one hand and aggressive secularists on the other. From antinomian pseudo-Sufis to politically hyperactive class of religionists we find other extremes failing to understand demands of either religion or contemporaneity. Our religious scholars generally choose not to be well informed on the troubling questions that modernity has raised.       It seems Muslims have been divided in their response to modernism, modern science and philosophy. From Mawlana Thanvi’s Answer to Modernism and his translator Hasan Askari’s deadly attack agains